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It's not every day you get to peel back the curtain on 1920s New York City, but the Museum of Modern Art has done just that.

Last week, the MoMA unveiled upwards of 33,000 photos of more than 3,500 exhibitions, dating all the way back to the museum's founding in 1929. “We have such a wealth of material we’ve held in the archives,” says Michelle Elligott, the museum's chief of archives. The problem: For decades, archived photographs were only available to researchers.

So in 2006, Elligott and Fiona Romeo, the museum's director of digital content, decided to digitize them. "MoMA has been a primary player in building the audience for modern and contemporary art, so we wanted to expand on that," Elligott says. A decade's worth of high-resolution scanning later ("each of those photographs was individually cataloged and scanned to the same quality that we would actually scan a work of art," Elligott says), those archives are finally available to the public.

Included in those photos are images from MoMA's 1929 inaugural exhibition, which showcased post-impressionism artists Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gough, pictured in the gallery above. Already established artists in Europe, the crew had yet to make the leap across the pond to New York and have their work displayed. "MoMA had no collections yet; so far, this was a lone show," Elligott says.

You might notice from the photographs that the inaugural exhibition wasn't in the 53rd street location where MoMA is today. Founder Alfred Barr first established the museum in rented office quarters on the 12th floor of an office building on 57th and 5th. The exhibit only ran for a month, but the unprecedented assemblage of works attracted nearly 47,000 visitors, making MoMA a cultural destination practically overnight. "I think it's safe to say that Alfred Barr recognized these artists as the pillars of modernism and it was a great way to launch a new endeavor dedicated to showcasing modern art," Elligott says.

There was an appetite for it then, and there's an appetite for it today. Now, thanks to Elligott and Romeo's efforts, you can visit that inaugural exhibition for yourself, and see the pieces as they originally appeared. Many modern art and design museums have digitized their collections of late, including the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and Harvard Art Museums, but there's a singular charm to MoMA's approach. A photograph of an exhibition conveys a sense of time, space, and context that an image of an object simply can't. In digitizing images of its exhibition, as opposed to its individual holdings, MoMA has digitized a piece of the museumgoing experience itself.